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CREATING KINHIN: BUILDING A NEW OLD PRACTICE

7/22/2020

 
See Part 1 of Creating Kinhin: Menzan Mends our Ways
Picture
Menzan used bits and pieces from Indian and Chinese sources to write the Kinhinki, a short text describing kinhin, connecting it to mainstream Buddhists texts and including his own explanations and comments.  He had to accomplish two things in this text: gather up descriptions and instructions for doing kinhin, and quote sutras and other texts that give those instructions the weight of authority.

Early sources describe holding the hands in shashu, taking the appropriate mental attitude, and walking neither fast nor slow in a straight line before turning around and coming back.  However, the texts on monastic rules that were available to Dogen when he was training just instruct practitioners to generally walk in a way appropriate for a temple and indicate that walking inside or under the eaves in one's free time is fine.  

Dogen’s Bendoho describes something that sounds like our slow kinhin in relation to entering and leaving the zazen hall, not as something done between zazen periods.  The hands are clasped together inside the sleeves, but nothing is mentioned about matching one's breathing to one's steps.  The Hokyoki has more; that text describes what Dogen learned from his teacher Tendo Nyojo.  It describes the slow walk with half steps and matched breathing, and Tendo Nyojo says he’s the only one who knows this practice.  Again there is nothing about when and how long to do kinhin or its purpose or role as a practice.

Overall, there is nowhere near the detail about the posture or context of kinhin that Dogen provides about zazen, so we can’t really make a direct link between Dogen’s walking and our kinhin process.  We also can’t link kinhin to what’s described in the Pali Canon.  Even so, the two main points that Menzan makes in the Kinhinki are:
1) Kinhin is an old and orthodox practice of the Buddha himself, and 
2) Tendo Nyojo somehow had preserved this neglected practice and taught it to Dogen face-to-face.

By putting together the old texts that have instructions, Menzan tried to show that he had restored the true ritual kinhin practice of the buddhas and ancestors.  
The actual result is that Menzan made something new out of fragments of unrelated texts scattered across time and space.  He doesn’t refer to living examples of temples that do it this way, which is an interesting contradiction in the way the Kinhinki is created.  On the one hand, it relies on various texts to establish the way kinhin should be done.  On the other, a central theme in the Kinhinki is that Tendo Nyojo somehow preserved the practice and personally passed it down to Dogen and thus it’s a legitimate Soto practice.

Menzan wrote the Kinhinki in the style of Dogen teaching about zazen, and it’s now considered the basis for modern Soto Zen kinhin despite the lack of instruction about alternating it with zazen periods.  It's also not clear whether the hand position he’s describing is isshu or shashu, and that’s relevant to Sanshin.  Kodo Sawaki did isshu 揖手 during kinhin as we do now rather than shashu 叉手.  His biography says only his lineage does isshu even in Japan.  Also, the Kinhinki says one should stand without moving for a few minutes before starting to walk, whereas Sawaki Roshi began walking right away.  

Uchiyama Roshi apparently said that that before Sawaki Roshi's time practitioners weren't sitting more than one period of zazen at a time and thus they didn't need to know about alternating this with kinhin.  It seems that teachers who wanted to recreate the practice of kinhin studied relevant texts and interpreted them differently, leading to the various styles we see today.

CREATING KINHIN: MENZAN MENDS OUR WAYS

7/8/2020

 
PictureMenzan Zuiho
We might imagine that everything we do in the zendo started with Dogen.  After all, he wrote so many instructions for zazen and for functioning in a temple.  But when it comes to kinhin, what we do was cobbled together in the late 1700s as part of a Soto reformation project.  We don't really know what Dogen's walking practice was like.

Walking is mentioned in the Pali Canon as one of the four postures of the Buddha and his disciples.  As a practice, it was done outside with the focus on correct walking demeanor rather than a particular form.  However, there is no description of kinhin as we know it in standard texts, certainly not for the slow style we use today.  

A monk named Menzan Zuiho (1683-1769) pieced instructions together out of bits of writings attributed to Dogen and then tried to show a connection with two well known sutras as well as other texts in order to legitimize it.  Menzan was a reformer who wanted to root out practices and doctrines that had crept into Soto Zen but that he saw as not being Dogen’s teaching

The Soto reform movement started in 1700, before Menzan became involved.  There had been a government ruling in 1615 directing that Soto had to follow the "house rules" of Eiheiji because it was the head temple.  There were similar guidelines for other Buddhist sects.  But Eiheiji didn’t have a written set of house rules, so now the reformers argued that that the entirety of Dogen’s writings, newly available after having been neglected and unread for centuries, should be taken as the house rules.  They went over all the writings, looking for examples of how current practices had deviated from these rules, but this examination was not welcomed by everyone.  Those actually practicing at Eiheiji held that their way was right because they were directly descended from Dogen and were the protectors of his temple and practice.  

Thus began a rivalry between 
texts and practice – which was authentic?  The government supported the texts as authoritative, over heavy opposition from many leaders of the Soto school.  With this precedent in place, any time there was a disagreement about how something should be done both sides turned to Dogen’s texts for support for their arguments, which made texts the ultimate source.  Authority no longer came from face-to-face transmission of practice from teacher to student but from interpretations of texts.

Menzan became a leading figure in the reform movement, particularly related to monastic practice.  He wanted to take everything back to the old true Chinese way that Dogen learned when he went to China and practiced with Tendo Nyojo.  One thing that particularly annoyed Menzan was the practice of walking while reciting Buddha’s name, not a legitimate Soto practice in his mind because it had been adopted from the practices of the Obaku Zen sect.  The problem was that there isn’t much in Dogen’s writings about kinhin, so the house rules don’t help with that.  Menzan had to start looking elsewhere for clues about how Soto Zen walking practice should be done.

Next:  Creating Kinhin: building a new old practice

    WHAT IS THE SANSHIN STYLE?

    In this lineage we look to a core group of principles and elements that make up the backbone of our particular style of practice—that in which we ourselves engage and the practice in which we lead others.  These come from the teachings of the Buddha, Dogen Zenji, Uchiyama Roshi and Okumura Roshi.  Learn more here.

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